Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain: 24.4.20

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.   

- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain*

COVID-19 ROUND-UP

General

Spain: HT to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for this map of how the 17 regions have been affected.

The UK: Click here if you want to know more about the initial 'core error' and continuing mistakes of the British government. As the author says: This pandemic was both predictable and predicted. But when it came to the crunch, the government was unprepared. And while it is all very well being wise after the event, there were an awful lot of people wise before it happened. This government, and many others, chose not to listen. Will heads roll? Almost certainly not.

Life in Spain in the Time of Something Like Cholera

• María's Chronicle Day 40, with an interesting dissertation.
• Kids: What you can and can't do with them outside the home.
• And this might lift some of the confusion about what you can do with your rug-rats as of now:.

• Excellent news from Galicia and from Andalucia.
• And interesting news from not far north of here, close to a camino route, I believe. 

Normal Life in Spain

• See the estimable Guy Hedgecoe here on the blame game that's being played out in the torrid atmosphere of Spanish tribal politics. No wonder they had a civil war, one's tempted to say.

The EU 

• Unhappy Italy.
• Europe faces the most poisonous North-South showdown since the creation of monetary union. The raw emotions of Covid-19 have brought matters to a head.

Nutters Corner/The USA

• I haven't featured one of these for a while. Parts of the USA seem to be overrun with them. But possibly a false impression.
• Mind you, one of the more prominent nutters is now suggesting that the virus be attacked not only by a strong internal light but also by the injection of a household disinfectant. Thank god he's confined to a lunatic asylum - La Casa Blanca - and can't do any harm.

Spanish

• An anonymous reader recently kindly corrected my contention that the words asistir and discutir didn't really mean To help and To discuss, respectively. I willingly accept that these meanings do appear in the dictionary of the Royal Academy but would add that Spanish friends say these verbs aren't often used in those senses. I was reminded of this by finding this morning that you won't find these topical words in the RA's dictionary:- Desescalonamiento and Desescalada, both of which I believe are being used for 'loosening' in the context of our ferocious lockdown.
• P. S. As for discutir meaning both To discuss and To argue, observation of Spanish chatter suggests that this distinction (nuance/matiz) isn't universally appreciated here . . .

Finally . . .

• I contacted both the British and Irish embassies to check my sister was able to cross into Portugal to catch a flight home from Oporto, when they're up and running in May. The Irish embassy replied immediately and gave me helpful advice. The British embassy took days to send me a reply that merely pointed me to sites which hadn't answered the question. So you can guess what I replied to their statement: We hope you found this information useful. I suppose there are a lot more Brits with enquiries in Spain than Irish folk. But, even so, not impressive.

 *A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.